Catholic League president Bill Donohue commented today on the retirement party for Frances Kissling, head of Catholics for a Free Choice (CFFC), scheduled for March 2, two days after she resigns:
“In 1993, and again in 2000, U.S. Catholic bishops, represented by the bishops’ conference, denounced CFFC as a fraud. And well they should have. Funded almost exclusively by fat-cat bigots like those at the Ford Foundation (they gave CFFC $2 million in 2005, which was more than it gave to all but five of 141 organizations it allotted grants to in its ‘Human Rights’ program that year), Kissling has deceitfully represented herself as running a Catholic group. It would be more accurate to say that she has been running the most notoriously anti-Catholic front group in the nation. She once told Mother Jones, ‘I spent twenty years looking for a government that I could overthrow without being thrown in jail.’
“Guess who is going to honor Kissling at her going-away party? Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro. She is not just any Catholic Democrat—she is the one who led 55 Catholic House Democrats a year ago in their ‘Statement of Principles.’ That document was a failed attempt to reconcile the pro-abortion position of Catholic congressmen with the teachings of the Catholic Church. It was so poorly done that Cardinal William Keeler, Cardinal Theodore McCarrick and Bishop Nicholas DiMarzio issued a statement of their own reminding these Catholics that ‘Catholic teaching calls all Catholics to work actively to restrain, restrict and bring to an end the destruction of unborn human life.’
“DeLauro is past executive director of the radically pro-abortion EMILY’S LIST, the richest PAC in the nation. Now she has really crossed the line: to honor the biggest anti-Catholic bigot in the nation is a direct slap in the face at Catholicism.
“There are good Catholic Democrats out there. It’s time they took corrective action. If they don’t, Catholics will be forgiven if they conclude that the Democratic party has an animus against their religion.”
